Let's Do Some Living After We Die
by Frisky Wallabee
Summary: What? I'm back? AU, Slash, Javid. Jack lives a meaningless life helped only by the music he makes. Then he meets someone that'll change his outlook.
1. rock'n'roll cowboy

A/N: I'm back and, you know, officially this time

**A/N:** I'm back and, you know, officially this time. I cannot leave this fandom, I see. And I am like herpes: I KEEP COMING BACK. Seriously, though, this is somewhat of a comeback. Not the comeback I had before where the output kind of sucked—that was my "Steel Wheels" comeback that was heralded as a comeback but wasn't. This is my "Voodoo Lounge" comeback that's much more of a return to form. Sorry, Stones humor. Anyway, I have much time to kill when I'm not being a college student and I've been re-watching/exposing people to Newsies…but I digress. Really.

**Disclaimer:** Disney owns 'em and I'll have 'em back before they're any the wiser…also, any songs used/mentioned here belong to their respective artists and I do not intend to use them for profit or promotion; only for entertainment/story-advancing purposes. Rosie, though, belongs to me...but I don't know of anyone who'd want her…

--

As long as Jack Kelly could remember, he loved music. His mother died when he was very young. She was driving home from working in a bar a few miles north that tipped better and decided that she'd rather crash her car into a tree than continue to raise Jack.

His parents were never married but he liked to pretend that they were. His dad was a nice guy and a loving father but not a good person. Their town was in the sticks, in a shit-hole. They lived in a trailer in the middle of Bum-fuck nowhere. His dad was a drug dealer and cooked crystal meth in their bathtub.

Jack grew used to having drugs all around him. He'd sneak the dregs from his dad's glasses of beer and inhale the marijuana smoke that wafted through the particle board that separated their two rooms. His dad was kind of touchy and irritable when he was on drugs, though he never hit Jack. Jack was his pride and joy. His little cowboy.

His dad had been doing heavy coke when Jack was two until he found out that he could save his nose merely by doing freebase. He took to this like a house on fire. Jack was never alone when his father was on base. He'd take him to the bars and let him play with his cowboy figurines on the pool table. Francis Kelly and his other degenerate friends would down drink after drink at the bar while Jack pretended that the green felt was grass and he was riding the range. It was on one particular outing when he heard the sweetest sounds from the jukebox in the corner. A lilting guitar and sour vocals that made his head spin.

"…And you can send me dead flowers every mornin'…" the voice sang in a put-on, country twang. "Send me dead flowers by the mail…"

Jack started trying to ape the lyrics as the song went on but it ended before he could. Jack, though, was still two and couldn't understand the other words like "upholstered" and "Cadillac." Every time his dad would take him to the bar, though, he'd coax a few quarters off of him and have him put on that song.

He later found out that the band who sang that song was called The Rolling Stones and that they were British and not at all from the country. They were outlaws, though, he thought. Jack decided that he wanted to be one of them when he was five. He practiced a British accent and put unlit cigarettes in his mouth and affected a languid slouch as he played an invisible guitar. The one he wanted to be most like was the guitarist, Keith. To Jack, he was a real life, slam-a-jam-a cowboy.

He told his to his dad who laughed but on his sixth birthday, got Jack a tiny guitar with cowboy decals and a whole slew of records. As he got older, he found out that these materials were stolen for him but he didn't care either way. By that time, he was just as jaded as to expect it.

With the records and the guitar, he'd laboriously listen to them and copy what he heard on his own little guitar. He'd wear sunglasses and bandanas with cowboy boots. To be a rock'n'roll cowboy was now his mission in life.

Unsurprisingly, Jack did horribly in school. The teachers would be teaching math and he'd be off in a fantasy-land of gun-toting guitarists and petticoat whores. It was because of this did he befriend Louis, the son of one of his dad's friends. The man was in jail for blinding him with a class ring and Louis wore the eye patch he was given with pride. He had blonde hair that was once in a boyish bowl but he grew into a shag to look like one of The Faces. He could play any instrument, Jack thought. Pick up an instrument and get a grasp on it in a few minutes. Louis—nicknamed Blink because of that eye patch—had a nasty habit of stealing things and cutting class. He and Jack often skived off of class to smoke cigarettes behind the bleachers. Jack didn't do many drugs outside the most recreational but Blink was quickly following in their parents' footsteps. He did anything anyone passed to him no matter what it was or what it was mixed with. He'd jump out of cars as they still moved and partied in junkyards.

Jack dropped out of school with Blink when they were sixteen. They started playing at the local bar that had once played the music that so captivated Jack as a youngster. The same bar that had the pool table that served as his nursery. The same bar where Jack would eventually meet the love of his life—but that one comes later.

--

Blink was the only kid Jack knew who could strum a guitar while holding a cigarette. He kept it held between his middle and ring finger as he strummed. His wide, clownish mouth was spread wide in a smile before he belched into the microphone.

"Lovely," the bartender said.

He was a kid, not much older than them, whose name they didn't know. He was skittish, though, and prone to bouts of insanity so Jack just called him Skittery.

"Just testing the mic," Blink explained with an easy smile.

Jack shook his head and laughed. He was smoking as well but preferred to keep the cigarette just dangling from his lower lip.

"You're gross," Skittery shot back lamely.

Blink frowned and put a hand over his heart. "Oh, right in the feel-bads, Skits. Why do you cut me so?"

Skittery rolled his eyes and went back to wiping down glasses. Jack took in his group. They weren't a band by any stretch. A motley crew of various denizens of Tiger Hollow. Kids who had nothing better to do than go to a bar, drink illegally, and play hoochie-cootchie music from a kid who wanted to be Keith Richards. Their bassist that night was a friend of Blink's. He was a drug addict Blink referred to solely as Mush. Their drummer was a loudmouth Italian from New York who called himself Racetrack. So many people in Tiger Hollow refused to go by real names. It was America's Australia, Jack often thought. Throw in the convicts and the rejects.

"Hey, Rod Stewart," Racetrack hollered. "I can't see over your head—and dontcha know the goddamn Faces broke up in '75? And only two of them went on to do anything?"

"Which two?" Mush asked blearily.

"Singer and guitarist," Blink answered before turning to Race. "Shut your goddamn hole, fucker. I know that."

Race pounded out a beat in response, a sneer curled on his face.

"I like my hair," Blink countered.

"So do the farmers when they have you crow every morning, right?" Race cocked a brow.

Blink hurled a glass at his drum kit. It crashed on one of the cymbals. Race gave him a glare.

"Do it again, you backwoods fucker and I'll cut your throat."

Jack was surprised at that. When he had met the short guy, he seemed congenial and funny—a real hoot. He figured, though, that if someone came near his guitar, he'd want to brain him too.

"Didn't their drummer join The Who?" Mush was still mumbling about The Faces.

"Who cares about The Who?" Blink snarled. "The Who fucking suck. Always did. Artsy bullshit and too many fucking egos."

The others seemed to agree and Race, pacified somewhat by Blink's commentary on The Who, went back to tuning his snare.

"Who was their singer?" Mush asked.

Jack sighed and turned to him. "Of The Who or The Faces?"

"…Faces…they sound familiar. What'd they sing?"

Blink glanced up from his guitar and took a drag on his cigarette before answering.

"Rod Stewart was the lead singer of The Faces," he explained. "They were pretty much him and a backing band."

Jack glared. "No way. They may have kind of sucked but the guitarist—"

"I thought Rod Stewart was their guitarist?" Mush asked.

Race cocked a brow and gave him a look that read: _dumbass_.

"Oh, right. Jacky-boy's getting all defensive," Blink teased. "'Cause their guitarist went on to join his precious Stooooones."

Jack clenched his fist at that, especially considering that Blink liked them, too.

"Fuck off, Louis. You're the one who has his haircut."

"The Faces had a guitarist?" Mush asked. "I thought…wait…Rod Stewart's in The Rolling Stones?"

Jack decided to never again let Blink pick who played with them.

"No," he said evenly. "He isn't. Ron Wood is in The Stones. _He_ was The Faces' guitarist!"

He turned away from their idiocy and played a short riff on his guitar to test their piss-poor amplification. It sounded dragging and druggy, as always. He wanted just to play to at least end the stupid conversation that was being had. He was told that Mush was supposedly a killer bassist but he was getting increasingly pissed at this entire arrangement that he wanted to walk off before they even played.

"Isn't he an alkie?" Race asked snidely.

A stupid comment to be made in a bar full of current and future alcoholics. Jack had had enough. He unplugged his guitar and stormed out. The neck banged painfully against his hipbone as he walked briskly away from the low stage Skittery had built for them. As he left, he heard Blink say to Race,

"Way to fucking go, dipshit."

--

Once outside, Jack carefully unhooked his guitar and placed it next to him. He then reached into his army surplus jacket and retrieved his pack of Marlboros. He always smoked Marlboros from when he had started smoking at age eleven. Cowboys smoked Marlboros, he was told. More importantly, his idol smoked them as well. Jack was a self-admitted sucker for hero worship. It was why he drank Jack Daniels and listened to Chuck Berry. He wished he could find people to play with whose necks he didn't want to wring. Blink was fine most of the time. Jack figured that he was thinking about his next hit of base rather than concentrating on playing. Loved his drugs, Blink did.

The others, Jack wanted to brain with his guitar. Race was annoying and loud and Mush didn't play with a full deck. He wanted a _real_ band. A band he could call his own.

"You seem glum." The voice that spoke to him was feminine yet a little raspy.

Jack glanced up from his cigarette to see a girl leaning casually against the front of the bar. She was around his age, he guessed, and had long brown hair in two, loose braids. He was most struck by what she was wearing. Corduroy pants tucked into moccasin boots and a plaid shirt with a knit vest over it. It all looked expensive.

"Astute," Jack replied. "And you're not from here. You've got nice clothes."

"Astute yourself," she replied. "Yeah. My family's from New York. But we moved down here…because I'm fairly certain my mom finally leapt off of the deep end."

He smirked. She smiled back. He wasn't used to new people, let alone girls. Of course, he didn't especially cotton to girls. Especially city girls with designer clothes, rustic though they may be.

"My great-aunt lived here," she continued. "Gert Freedman?"

"Your aunt's Crazy Gert?" Jack quirked a brow. "With the thirty-two cats?"

She nodded, a smile playing on her lips.

"She died last week so we're here in her house because my mother thinks it will build character and get us away from the mad drive in New York. All pathetic, really. But, whatever. I'll adapt. I'm Rosie and I'm guessing you're the entertainment here?"

She was gesturing to his guitar. Jack nodded.

"Yeah. I'm Jack. This is Dooley's Bar…I play here. Don't worry about the drinking age because our cops are loadies."

She laughed until she saw that he was serious.

"I don't drink," she told him. "Well, I would…I mean, I like the idea of drinking but the execution makes me ill. I'm not going to fit in here, am I?"

He shook his head. "No. But I'm fairly clean so…"

He looked at her. She was skinny and little and almost very pretty. Yeah, she'd be fucked.

"Just stick with me," he assured. "I only smoke spliffs and cigarettes and drink. So you'll be safe from the druggies."

"I feel honored," she replied.

"Please do. Do you play an instrument?"

Rosie shook her head. Jack sighed; he didn't think she would.

"You want to come in and meet my friends?" he offered.

Jack threw the remains of his cigarette down and crushed it. She shook her head again.

"You've got me scared, now," she said with a laugh.

"They're harmless. Stoned—but generally harmless. They're on base most of the time so they're dead to the world. My mate Blink was doing it in the bathroom and I went in and did my, you know, business without him even realizing I was there."

Rosie laughed again. Jack found himself somewhat liking her in that she wasn't a druggie and, more importantly, he hadn't grown up around her like the other girls in school. He still had no feelings about women but she didn't need to know that—nobody needed to know about Jack. His hero worship of Keith had extended beyond mere boyhood wishes. He realized, staring at his idol's face peering up at him in post-adolescent surprise from the cover of "Out of Our Heads" that he was in love with the guitarist and even more attracted to men he knew.

He picked his guitar back up and hooked it up to the strap that had still dangled over his neck. Chivalrously, he held the door open for Rosie as she entered the bar. To his surprise, Blink, Mush and Race were waiting for him. Race was twirling his drumsticks in one hand and Mush was blinking his eyes in obviously confusion.

"Is that your band?" she asked.

"No," Jack replied. "They're just a group of losers I play with. I don't actually have a band. My mate, Blink—the one in the eye patch—he'd be in it, though. We've been friends since were little."

She nodded and shifted from foot to foot. Rosie was getting looks from the various men but largely due to the fact that women rarely entered Dooley's.

"He's the one who does freebase, right?" she asked.

Jack nodded. "Yeah. Totally harmless…stoned anyway. Sober, he has a bit of a temper. You can sit down to listen to us if you'd like."

"Sure. I have nothing else to do."

Jack made his way back to the stage and Rosie situated herself at an empty table.

"The prodigal son returns," Race said with a smirk. "And picked up a chick. She's kinda cute."

"I didn't pick her up," Jack said mater of factly. "Now let's play before I kill you all."

Jack plugged his guitar back into the homemade amp and turned to face the crowd. When he played, everything seemed to vanish. Jack lived for the feeling he got when he sang or strummed his guitar. Belting out cowboy tunes or rockabilly rough. Singing the blues like Muddy Waters or pounding out rock'n'roll like his idols. The entire world melted into nothingness and he was in his fairyland. His land of saloons and magic. He wasn't onstage with his friend and two morons and there wasn't a girl he had just met sitting there with a little smile on her face. It was just him and his guitar.

Jack was so preoccupied, being in his own world that he created by playing his guitar that he didn't notice the lone, male figure slip in and sit at a table. That, though, is for later.


	2. jaded bob geldof

Perhaps it was time, in this sordid tale that is about to unfold, to reveal the more elusive protagonist

Perhaps it was time, in this sordid tale that is about to unfold, to reveal the more elusive protagonist.

David Elihue Jacobs was the middle child of a middle-class, Jewish family from New York. They owned a furniture store, which made a decent amount of money but circumstances changed with the economy and his father decided that furniture was too stiff and thankless and instead opened a carpeting store. He said that carpeting was the future. David figured that his father had lost his mind.

His father doubled his supposed insanity by moving his family "where the carpet was." Thus, when David was at the tender age of ten, he was shuffled into the family station wagon and driven down to Tiger Hollow, Georgia.

His older sister, Sarah, thrilled at the experience to go down south as she had fallen in love with the idea of Antebellum, southern gothic culture. Needless to say, Scarlet O'Harawitz was surprised that the beautiful south wasn't so…beautiful. At least, Tiger Hollow was not. It sat near a swamp and its back was cushioned by the Everglades. David decided, as he peered up from the Chemistry textbook he had been perusing to take in his new home, that it was a pit.

The school was more or less a joke. Teachers without degrees walking through the low-ceilinged, un-air-conditioned classrooms in sneakers and tank tops. David knew that the nice education he had gotten for his first five grades was going down the toilet with each tick of the second-hand on the clock that never told the correct time.

Though he was not a rebel, David took a somewhat pleasure in giving little jabs at the establishment. At a futile assembly to keep the kids off drugs, the enthusiastic speaker informed them joyfully that no one had ever been nominated for the Nobel Prize "on dope." David had raised his hand, said simply, "Bob Geldof" and left it at that.

In eighth grade, he had submitted a paper declaring a man named Paul David Hewson had sold his soul to the devil and was to gain complete control of the world within the next five years. David outlined a grisly future world in which Hewson controlled every aspect a la Big Brother and kept everyone in line using his ultra-sonic, mutant voice powers. He got an A+ on the paper and was given extra credit points for his description and even the naming of his protagonist. David didn't bother to inform his teacher that Paul David Hewson was just Bono's real name.

David's jabs at society were minimal and largely inconsequential (although that presenter did add 'except Bob Geldof' to his speech, which made it ultimately less effective) until his tenth grade year or, rather, the year before last.

David had known he was gay since he had learned the definition of the word. He never had any friends and his family was absorbed in their southern-living, carpet-loving world for him to even try to reach them. Sarah might have understood but she was living "in sin" with her boyfriend and child three blocks away and David would rather grind his teeth down than have a conversation with Morris.

The only person who understood was his English teacher. Of course, by understood, it clearly meant that the man wanted to get into David's pants. And so he did. On his desk, usually, after class. Mr. Denton had been the only teacher at the God forsaken school that seemed to know shit from Shinola. Of course, despite being more learned than the other teachers at the school, he was still a teacher at Tiger Hollow High and, thus, couldn't be entirely smart. To whit, he never locked his door. The principal had come in and promptly had a heart attack at the sight of David and his teacher _in flagrante delicto_ on the desk. The principal was put in a physical rehabilitation hospital in Atlanta and Denton was fired.

David wasn't entirely friendless in his thankless existence wandering the cinderblock halls of Tiger Hollow High. Early in his sophomore year (pre-Denton) he had befriended a girl named Erin O'Malley. She, like him, had been exiled to Tiger Hollow by her less than sane family. Her father was a famous music producer who was on trial for killing her mother. She had been sent to live with her closest living relative: her grandmother who lived in a bungalow down at the edge of the swamp. Their friendship was sealed when David casually asked her if her father happened to be Phil Spector.

Erin could have been popular as she fit the criteria: she was tall, skinny and blonde with what a straight man would call a pretty face but she was less Barbie and more Daria, David had found out.

They would go over to his house and watch post-adolescent alienation films from the 1990s while sipping Diet Cokes and eating cheese sandwiches on white bread. Oftentimes, these excursions were accompanied by Bob Dylan wailing dissonantly in the background. Unsurprisingly, pot was often the guest of honor during that time. Though David would never touch a drop of alcohol nor inhale on a cigarette, he found that pot helped somewhat cushion the actual blow of living in what he suspected was America's asshole.

Despite this, David remained one of the most scholastically adept students at the high school. When he wasn't watching _Kicking and Screaming_ or pondering his adolescent cynicism, he would be reading his woefully outdated textbooks ("tensions between the north and south were at an all time high," one read).

Tonight, though, David was doing none of this. He had been coerced by his sister to fetch her boyfriend from Dooley's Bar. Morris often went there when he didn't want to deal with being a teenage father, which was a lot. Sarah usually braved the jeering men herself but instead recruited David to do her bidding.

Thus, he slogged through the mud and dirt, gravel-studded road that no car could drive on to reach the bar. Dooley's was a haven for illegal activity so the wooden clap-trap was set back almost into the swamp and shrouded by trees. David had never been in the establishment but had expected to see a scene from an old-time saloon. Perhaps rinky-dink piano music would come streaming out the door, nearly drowned out by the yells of the inevitable bar-fight going on inside. The front was oddly quiet until he opened the door.

A band was playing on a low platform that seemed about to give way. A blonde boy with hair like a rooster was singing "You're in My Heart" while the crew of drunken (and, of course, largely underage) men joined in. It was like a British soccer match, David thought. He was getting ready for the riot. David also noted that the boy singing wore a distinctive eye patch.

_Rod Stewart had sex with a pirate_, he thought with a chuckle. _Or David Bowie…._

The place was packed and David couldn't find Morris's leering, goateed face among the crowd. He spotted a deserted table near the front of the "stage" and decided to wait out the crowd there until he could fetch the drunken idiot and tow him home.

When he reached the table, David found that it wasn't _quite_ deserted. A brown haired girl with ass-lips wearing expensive-looking clothes was sitting there. David grabbed the chair opposite her, knowing the other obvious outcast would mind the intrusion.

While the Blondie the Pirate sang into the microphone, David scanned the mirth-filled faces of the other denizens of the bar. He needed to find Morris and get out. The atmosphere wasn't as tense as he had initially thought but far more druggy. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and the entire dank establishment smelled like beer. Beer, David thought, was possibly the vilest thing he had ever smelled and couldn't understand why or _how_ people drank it.

Unable to see his almost-brother-in-law's face among the crowd, David sighed and reluctantly turned his attention back to the stage. Forlornly, he let his chin fall to rest on the heel of his hand. With a final hurrah from the crowd, Blondie the Pirate stepped away from the mic and exchanged guitars with the tall, lanky boy who had been playing the electric on the last song.

Lanky—David was apt to giving people nicknames until he found out their real names—pulled a stool almost up to the lip of the platform. He was now wearing Blondie the Pirate's acoustic, a dingy thing that had probably seen better days. The boy was wearing cowboy boots and torn jeans. A scrap of a red bandana was around the tan column of his neck. The boy lifted his face up to the drunken crowd and gave a half-smile. David blinked his eyes.

"Whoa," he whispered.

The boy was uncannily attractive. His sandy hair fell boyishly into his eyes and tapered down the back of his neck. His eyes exuded a kind of warmth that David had never encountered before in his jade-colored land of cynicism. His smile was crooked, as was his nose but there was something endearing about those imperfections. Something that made his heart hammer in his chest.

"Hey," he said in a voice that mingled Kennedy-esque Bostonian with a New York slur and twang of Georgia peachy-peach. "I'm going to, uh, slow things down a little."

Another smile at the drunken men and he began to play.

David had never heard such beauty come from a guitar that wasn't flowing from his speakers. The tune was semi-familiar in a way that he thought he had heard it before but he wasn't even sure what it was called. The boy opened his mouth to the microphone that undoubtedly smelled like beer and pot and began to sing.

"Childhood living…is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you…"

His voice was raspy and yet honey-sweet. David lifted his head off of his hand and leaned forward. The boy's eyelids lowered and he seemed to get lost in his own world. The crowd was dead silent but David had a feeling that if they had been their normal, beer-driven selves, he would have just kept on playing.

"Wild horses," he sang melodiously. "Couldn't drag me away…wild, wild horses…couldn't drag me away…"

David recognized the song more fully now; some Rolling Stones track. He had never really put much stock in their output but the way this boy sang made him want to go out and by a slew of their albums. The rational-David in him smirked, thinking that the band should hire him for advertising. The riveted-David didn't move and just stared, listening to every word that left Lanky's mouth.

"…Wild, wild horses. We'll ride them someday…"

He finished and looked up at the crowd. The drunks burst into wild, raucous applause, as did the sober-looking Ass-Lips girl sitting next to him. David found himself, for once, joining in the majority and clapped exuberantly.

"Jack, everyone!" Blondie the Pirate proclaimed over the noise.

David felt his face heat up again.

Jack…Jack, everyone…


End file.
